Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (essential books to read txt) 📕

was a pair of civilian onlookers: Terry Ramsburg’s father and mother. Lillie Mae kept her distance.

Bill, Samantha, and Bruce quickly gathered their tools and crawled beneath the house. Agent Moore had already set up a work light in the crawl space, so the area was well lit. It took only a glance for Bill to confirm that the exposed bone was an innominate—a hipbone—and that it was human. Bill crawled to the doorway, extricated himself, and walked over to the small knot of officers. Robert Ramsburg got out of his car and joined the group; Lillie Mae edged over too.

“It’s definitely human,” Bill said. Terry’s father hung his head. Lillie Mae spun on her heel and strode away.

“This is bullshit,” she snarled. “This is fucking bullshit.” She got into her car, slammed the door, and cranked the starter.

Bill looked at Jim Moore and asked, as tactfully as he could manage, “Are you sure you want to let her leave?”

Moore looked unruffled. “She’s not going anywhere,” he said, with the assurance of a lawman who knew how to assess someone’s risk of flight.

Bill crawled back under the house, and the forensic team got back to work. As the most seasoned member, Bill was in charge. He put Samantha to work excavating the legs and Bruce exposing the left side while he moved up to the spot where he expected to find the skull.

In just a few minutes of troweling Bill found the back of the skull, indicating that the body was lying facedown. Toward the right side of it was a small, neat hole, its edges beveled so that it was slightly larger on the inside than on the outside. A fracture ran from the top of the hole all the way across the skull toward the left side. “Looks like we’ve got a gunshot entry wound,” he told Samm and Bruce.

Bill gently troweled the earth away to reveal the skull without moving it, an excavation technique called “pedestaling.” As he exposed the left side of the head, he saw more fractures near the forehead—a web of bone fragments angling outward—but no hole. “Hey, guys, the bullet might still be in the cranium,” he said excitedly. A few minutes more and Bill had completely exposed the skull. The cartilage joining it to the cervical vertebrae had long since decomposed, so Bill reached down and lifted it. As he rotated it to look at the face, he heard a small clatter within the cranium: a .22-caliber bullet rattling around in the space created by the drying and shrinking of the brain.

The sobering reality of the situation hit them hard when they’d finished excavating the remains, gathering the soil samples, and boxing everything up for the trip back to Knoxville. They put the remains, the clothing, and the soil samples in a cardboard specimen box, measuring one foot square by three feet long. As Samantha emerged from the crawl space carrying the box, Robert Ramsburg started toward her. In a panic she turned to Bill Grant. “What do I do?” she whispered. “Is he going to want to see the remains?”

“This is evidence,” said Bill. “He can’t. Don’t say anything; don’t even look at him.”

Eyes on the ground, Samm walked to the truck. From her downcast gaze and stricken face, Robert Ramsburg had to have a pretty good idea what the box contained.

He was right. It was his son.

It came as no surprise to anyone involved in the case that the anthropological examination indicated that the skeletal remains were those of a white male, age twenty-eight to thirty-four, measuring five feet five inches to five feet ten inches tall. It was also no surprise that dental X rays confirmed the victim to be Terry Ramsburg, a thirty-three-year-old white male who stood five feet six inches tall before a bullet laid him low.

I sent copies of our forensic report to the TBI, the Cumberland County sheriff, the Crossville Police Department, and the district attorney’s office on October 9. That same day, Lillie Mae Ramsburg Davis was charged with first-degree murder and held without bond.

Her trial was set for July of 1992. For months she proclaimed her innocence. Then, a week before the trial was scheduled to start, Lillie Mae cut a deal, pleading guilty to second-degree murder. Investigators told me that she’d shot him on the sofa as he lay sleeping, then dragged him under the house and buried him. Shockingly, she continued to inhabit the house, along with her two daughters, directly over Terry Ramsburg’s decaying body for another two and a half years; for part of that time her new husband lived atop the remains of his murdered predecessor.

Lillie Mae was sentenced to thirty years, but she became eligible for parole in just ten. At her parole hearing Robert Ramsburg, her former father-in-law, testified passionately against her release, and the parole board voted to keep her in prison.

Lillie Mae’s guilty plea turned time since death into a moot issue, legally speaking, but scientifically it was still important. Terry Ramsburg’s body had largely skeletonized under the house, except for a large quantity of adipocere beneath the chest and abdominal regions. (Adipocere—literally, “grave wax”—is a soapy, greasy substance that forms when fat decomposes in a damp environment.) The extent of skeletonization and adipocere formation told me that Terry Ramsburg had been in that crawl space a long, long time, probably since the day of his murder.

Could Arpad’s soil analysis confirm or pinpoint the time since death with any greater precision? Well, as often happens with new scientific techniques, in this case we learned more about the technique itself than about the murder to which it was applied.

All the volatile fatty acids Arpad tested for were below detectable limits, and those limits were pretty doggone low: twenty-two parts per million. In plain language, the body had lain there so long that the flesh-eating bugs had long since moved on to greener pastures, and even their waste products had evaporated into thin air. Temperature measurements taken in